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THE ART of PAUL REED: Color, Creativity, Curiosity

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THE ART of PAUL REED: Color, Creativity, Curiosity THE ART OF PAUL REED: Color, Creativity, Curiosity David Gariff Color thinks for itself, independently of the objects that it clothes. — Charles Baudelaire Paul Reed1 at the age of ninety-one continues to make art in the basement studio of his Arlington, Virginia home. The studio opens up to the light and colors of the landscape behind his house, a gentle descending slope through trees to a small tributary of the Potomac River. Reed spends as much time outdoors as weather permits. His most recent paintings, washes and drizzles of paint stained on unstretched, raw muslin, illuminate the rooms of his house. Attached to his windows, they create a vision of modernist stained glass that serves to unify and blur distinctions between interior and exterior, light and color, art and nature. As if in homage to Matisse and Rothko, light and color enliven this domestic space and present a personal microcosm of the defining nature of Paul Reed’s artistic world. There is no more revealing setting to illustrate the goals and ideas that have motivated Reed’s lifelong devotion to the art of painting and his endless exploration of the many and varied properties of color. This in no way diminishes Reed’s accomplishments in sculpture, photography, printmaking, graphic design, and computer-generated imagery—all of which are part of a continuity of thought and an endless curiosity about art. Paul Reed’s journey is a long one. A native of Washington, D.C. he is best known as one 1 For the Paul Allen Reed papers, 1952‐2008, see the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/collection/reedpaul.htm. For an oral history interview with Paul Allen Reed, 1994 April 29, see http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/oralhistory/reed94.htm 1 of the original artists of the Washington Color School.2 As with many artists, Reed’s career is characterized by many twists and turns along the way. After briefly attending college at San Diego State College (1936) and the Corcoran School of Art (1937), Reed found his way to New York City and employment as a magazine illustrator and graphic designer (1942-50). Reed’s time in New York during the 1940s coincided with the emergence of Abstract Expressionism. The achievements of New York School painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still made a lasting impression on him. Reed returned to Washington in 1950 to open his own free-lance graphic design firm. His long-standing friendship with the painter Gene Davis3 (1920-1985), who Reed had known since junior high school, continued and the two men were frequent visitors to the National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection,4 as well as to a host of smaller private galleries then thriving in the area. Speaking about Gene Davis, Reed states: My chief stimulation in art at that time came from Gene Davis. We talked, exchanged books, saw each other often. He is an intelligent man and his ideas were always interesting; possibly of more meaning to me than his work was at the time.5 Another formative influence on Reed was the local artist, curator, and teacher Jacob 2 For a history of the Washington Color School, see C. Humblet, The New American Abstraction 1950‐1970, 3 vols., Milan, Skira, 2007, volume 2 contains the chapter on Paul Reed. See also K. Wilkin, Color as Field: American Painting, 1950‐1975, New York, American Federation of Arts, 2007. 3 See Jacquelyn D. Serwer, et al., Gene Davis, a Memorial Exhibition, Washington, D.C., National Museum of American Art, 1987. 4 These two Washington museums also influenced Morris Louis concerning color. The Chester Dale Collection of Impressionist and Post‐Impressionist paintings had recently gone on view at the National Gallery. The Phillips Collection was created, in part, around the formal element of color with works by important modernists including Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Milton Avery, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Arthur Dove. See E.A. Carmean, Jr., Morris Louis: Major Themes and Variations, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, 1976, 3. See also Kimberly A. Jones and Maygene Daniels, The Chester Dale Collection, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, 2009. 5 G. Nordland, The Washington Color Painters, Washington, D.C., Washington Gallery of Modern Art, 1965, 42. 2 Kainen (1909-2001). Kainen was an important conduit of information about abstract painting and the New York School for all young Washington artists at the time.6 In 1952, Reed turned his attention to painting. The influence of the American Abstract Expressionists shapes this early work. These small-scale experiments in oil, watercolor, enamel, and gouache on paper or masonite, Alpha (1952) and Platform I (1956) for example, are fluid and loosely painted in keeping with the spontaneity and vigor of the New York School. Platform I also explores the tension between a painterly field and a geometric form descending from the top edge of the frame, similar to the “push and pull” of tensions in paintings by Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell. This dialogue between color and structure, active and static elements, would become an important part of Reed’s vocabulary in later works. Also of importance for Reed at this time were the “Flag” and “Target” series by Jasper Johns that had recently burst on the art scene. The “Flag” paintings appeared to Reed as a daring venture with their edge-to-edge treatment of an iconic image, encaustic surfaces, and color alterations. With the availability of commercially produced acrylic paints, both magna (an acrylic resin paint) and water-based acrylics in the1950s, Reed began to explore the properties and working methods of staining or soaking colors into unprimed, cotton duck canvas. Here he built upon techniques already pioneered by Morris Louis7 (1912-1962), and Kenneth Noland8 (1924- 6 For an online transcript of an oral history interview with Jacob Kainen, 1982 August 10 – September 22, see The Smithsonian Archives of American Art, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/oralhistory/kainen82.htm 7 See John Elderfield, Morris Louis, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1986. 8 See Karen Wilkin, Kenneth Noland, New York, Rizzoli, 1990 and Diane Waldman, Kenneth Noland: A Retrospective: the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1977. The term “Washington Color School” can be misleading. Reed, for example, never knew Morris Louis personally. Louis died on September 7, 1962 at the age of forty‐nine at his home in Washington, D.C. 3 2010) in Washington who, in turn, had witnessed the stained paintings of Helen Frankenthaler9 in New York in 1953. The seminal Frankenthaler picture in this evolution was Mountains and Sea, 1952 (on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington).10 By 1959, Reed was engaged in the staining process, allowing water-based acrylics to bleed and fuse into the surface of the canvas and respond to gravity to create floating, luminous, and optical fields of color. The center of the canvas is of particular importance in Reed’s first stained series, “Mandala.” (Mandala is the Sanskrit word for “circle.”) In works like #27 (1962) and 12C (1963) the circular designs of color appear to radiate outward from a central core. Centrality is reinforced by the square format of the supports (3’ x 3’ and 2’ x 2’ respectively). A feeling of expansiveness and luminosity characterizes these paintings as seemingly disembodied colors appear to shift and pulsate. One thinks of Kenneth Noland’s “Target” series, but in Reed’s “Mandala” paintings, it is as much about outward movement as inner focus. In both series, color interactions are at the heart of the effects, and lessons learned from important color theorists Josef Albers (1888-1976) and Ilya Bolotowsky (1907-1981) underpin the works.11 It was clear to many in the art world that something important was emerging from the painters in Washington, D.C. Much of the activity centered on the Washington Gallery of Modern Art (WGMA) near Dupont Circle, one of the first galleries devoted to contemporary art 9 See Julia Brown, After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956‐1959, New York, Guggenheim Museum, 1998. 10 For a discussion of the impact of Mountains and Sea on both Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, see Clement Greenberg, “Louis and Noland,” Art International, IV, 5, May 25, 1960, 26‐29. 11 Noland studied at Black Mountain College, near his hometown Asheville, North Carolina, when both Albers and Bolotowsky were faculty members there in the late 1940s. Paul Reed’s interest in colors placed in close proximity to each other owes much to Albers whose influential book Interaction of Color appeared in 1963. Reed also cites the writings of the nineteenth‐century theorist Michel Eugène Chevreul, notably his 1855 text The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors, and Their Application to the Arts as important to him. 4 in the city. Established in 1961, the gallery officially opened to the public in November 1962 with a posthumous retrospective of Franz Kline’s work. Many New York School painters, including Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko attended the opening.12 The first director of the WGMA was Adelyn Breeskin. Among the shows organized during her tenure were exhibitions devoted to Arshile Gorky (1963), Ellsworth Kelly (1963), and Vincent van Gogh (1964). In June 1964, Gerald Nordland succeeded Breeskin. In 1965, Nordland curated an exhibition titled The Washington Color Painters. It featured paintings by six local artists considered the seminal figures in the new painting emerging from the city.
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